Adventures in my Kitchen

This post comes to you from my kitchen.  We definitely feel like we are slow stepping towards Spring here, the days are longer, the sun is shining more.  It is still bitterly cold and we are still getting frost and the occasional flurries of snow.  In the kitchen we are most definitely still eating the food of winter.  The veg boxes are full of root veggies and will be for many more weeks to come.  I am heading towards the time of being ready to move on from those but know that is still a way off yet.

My kitchen is a small space, 3.7m x 2.8m this has been extended from the original footprint of 2.8m x 2.5m by previous owners removing internal walls.  I have also made use of an under stair cupboard as a pantry which originally would have been in the hall.  I have read in a few places recently that having your washing machine in the kitchen is a peculiar quirk of Europeans, whilst I cannot speak for those over the channel, where I have not visited many private homes, in the UK it is commonplace.  This is because it is often the only place to put it.  Many of our homes were built before washing machines were even a thing so a separate utility room is a rarity, my house is nearly 100 years old and is unusual in my village as it was originally built with an internal bathroom, most of the houses we looked at before buying this one had had a bathroom retrofitted by taking some space from the largest bedroom.  The alternative would be to locate it in the living room or dining room as the hall is not a big enough space, that is the downstairs of my house, so the kitchen is where it sits and always will do.

I am continuing to make full use of my slow cooker, I love that I can throw some ingredients into it in the morning and by the evening we have a tasty meal to eat.  It is really helpful on those days when we are home a bit later and need to eat shortly after we walk through the door.  I have found that jacket potatoes do well, they don't have the crispy outer that you get from the oven but that is a small price to pay with the amount of electricity we are saving.  I wrap each potato in silver foil and place it in the slow cooker, it takes about 3-4 hours on the highest heat on mine.  Being the frugal person that I am I keep the silver foil unwrapping the potatoes carefully each time to allow for that, it lasts about five or six uses.  I bought a new to me recipe book last month and have found a few dishes in there that go well with jacket spuds, pinto bean chilli being our most favourite so far.  We love these beans and I love it when I find a recipe to use them in.

My sourdough starter is still doing well, I thought I had killed it at one point but I threw most of it into the compost bin and fed it up again and it was as right as rain within a couple of days.  I make bread at least once a week, sometimes more, if I have the oven on more often.  I cut the loaves in half and freeze them, that way I always have a supply.  I feel like I have mastered the recipe that I have been using for a while now and am considering others to give us some variety.  I watched a series of programmes about sourdough and have used some of the techniques mentioned in them, I feel like I am slowly getting a feel for the dough, how much I need to kneed it and what it should look like when it is properly cooked.  I am realising that these are skills that are so much easier to pick up if they are passed on rather than read about in books.

I had an intention to make and eat more fermented foods this year.  I haven't got round to making sauerkraut yet but I have had a continual supply of fermented pancake mix to make dosas.  There are hundreds of recipes out there to make these pancakes, mine uses quinoa and lentils with fenugreek powder.  As it is winter I have to leave this mix for a few days to get the fermenting process going, it sits on the side doing its thing.  I am eating a pancake for breakfast a couple of days a week.  I have also made a quantity of fermented coconut chutney to go with them, I am still working my way through the first batch I made this year but it is running low so I need to make some more soon.

These dosas have been a welcome re-addition to my breakfast choices, I am not a cereal girl and I am not keen enough on porridge to have it every day.  I had been eating boiled eggs every morning which whilst quick and easy is not very varied.  I have been making oatmeal pancakes again, a really simple recipe of medium oatmeal soaked overnight in yogurt before adding egg in the morning and frying them up into wee patties.  They are delicious with fruit and as I have a freezer brimming with fruit picked from the garden I have been making coulis with blackcurrants to have with mine, a good burst of Vitamin C which is always good thing in Winter.

I have also re-introduced risotto into our menu, we have it each week now after Alice requested it.  I have been looking for different recipes to give us some variety, apart from the traditional, for us, of just adding peas we have also had mushroom, tomato and mozzarella, squash and chilli and leek and tomato and mascarpone, this last incarnation is very rich but totally delicious.  If you have any vegetarian risotto recipes that you would care to share I would love to hear about them.

I have mentioned salve making on a previous post from my kitchen, I tried two batches last year and both sadly went mouldy.  I don't think the leaves were quite dry enough when I put them in the oil.  I removed a few leaves from my comfrey plant late last year and had them drying in the bowl in the kitchen.  I finally got round to soaking them in oil at the beginning of the year, they will soon be ready for making up into salves and are looking like they will not go mouldy this time, third time lucky, I hope.

That is my round up for my kitchen in Winter I will back again in the Spring, bye for now.

Adventures in my Kitchen

This post comes to you from my kitchen.  I had every intention of posting from my kitchen each season but that hasn't quite happened, the summer was a rather busy time and I hardly posted at all, ironic really when I had so much to write about.

The salve that I mentioned I had steeping the last time I posted from my kitchen sadly went mouldy.  That is the first time that has happened to me, the leaves were not all in the oil they were steeping in, their contact with the air, I think that is what caused it.  I threw it all in the compost bin and have started again, I hope this batch is good enough to make a salve with.  I need to buy some more jars for when the steeping is done.

I have been soaking and cooking pulses in industrial quantities periodically over the past months.  I buy my pulses dried mostly in 3kg bags, so that I didn't always have to remember to soak and cook them each time I needed them and to save energy by doing it with a larger batch every few months. I soak around half of the bag in a large bowl before cooking them all up.  I then freeze them in 250g quantities which is the approximate amount that you get in a can of pulses if you buy them that way.  I don't have to remember to get them out of the freezer hours before as most of the time I am throwing them into what I am cooking so they defrost in the heat of the food.  I am lucky to have a very large chest freezer in my garage which has plenty of space.  I always aim to have four or five different pulses out there and if they have just all been replenished there can be thirty or forty bags.  When I am down to the last one I will soak and cook some more to make sure I have a constant supply.  I got a bit out of this habit and have started it up again.  Now that it getting darker earlier I need to make sure that I get the right thing out, some of them look very similar in the dark!

I have mentioned in several posts recently about all the fundraising that we are currently doing to support Alice getting to South Korea next year.  We have been doing a lot of fundraising which has involved baking.  We have tried various recipes and how now settled on four cakes that we can make really quickly as we have done it so often.   It works best if Alice does most of the making and I do the clearing and washing up in between each cake and any of the prep that she finds hard or slows her down.  We have become a good team, the kitchen still ooks like a whirlwind has been through it by the time we have finished.  We make two gluten free cakes, a lemon drizzle and an almond and coconut traybake, and two gluten cakes, gingerbread and orange and poppyseed.  These were the ones that sold the best and we rarely come home with any much to the disappointment of my husband and Cameron.  We have had a bit of break from baking this month as none of the fundraising we have done has needed baking which has been really welcome.  We have plenty in the freezer now so next time we need cake we are good to go.

We had a good crop of edibles from the garden this year.  We are never going to reach a place where we are growing all our own food our tiny garden is way too small to reach that but we grow what we can.  We picked and froze 10lbs each of blackcurrants and whitecurrants.  I usually make these into a coulis type sauce over the winter months to give us all a good dose of vitamin C in the months when we need the most as there are so many more colds and the like around.  The rhubarb plants were less productive this year although they gave us a good crop, I have made huge amounts of rhubarb and orange sauce which is now in the freezer, I love having this on pancakes at breakfast time.  I need to split the rhubarb this autumn to encourage it to be a little more productive next year.  I have lots of friends who would like a plant for their gardens, rhubarb does well round here nearly every garden in my village seems to have a rhubarb plant although not all are being harvested from judging by the huge flower heads some display.

We have had an abundance of salad leaves, edible flowers and lettuce.  I didn't buy any of these for months.  I grow several different types of salad leaves, wild rocket being one of them it grows like a weed in my garden.  I tend to grow lettuce where you just pick the leaves, I can make them last for months if I water them well, they have finally gone to seed over the past couple of weeks.  My cucumbers, gherkins, tomatoes and courgettes did really well.  I managed to pickle one jar of gherkins this year as I discovered that I could add them as they are ready, it remains to be seen whether that works.  I have made several batches of courgette and brie soup which are now in the freezer to use up the last of the courgettes. I don't freeze it with the brie in it, I add this once it is defrosted.  Now that it has turned colder my leeks are doing well, I am picking chard and kale which I have in abundance, my cabbages are slowly growing and the purple sprouting broccoli has lasted another year and will hopefully flower again in the spring.  I have winter lettuces and salad leaves in the polytunnel which I hope will provided for us for a few more months before going dormant over the cold of winter.

We have moved to a more autumnal menu with soup, stews and bakes back on the menu.  I make full of use of my slow cooker which we purchased earlier this year.  There are a couple of days of the week when we are out in the afternoon until quite late and it is so good to come home to be able to put tea straight on the table as it has been cooking in the slow cooker.   I shared a couple of pages in my last post from a cookery book for a 'recipe' for a warm salad which is still a regular fixture on our menu.   There is also a page for a stew and also a grain bake using the same format.  I have been tried various combinations of these as I work with flavours and ingredients to find things that work, a buckwheat based bake as been the best attempt so far.

I thought I was going to lose my veg delivery box earlier this year.  The company I buy it from doesn't actually deliver to my village.  Unfortunately for us there is another company that does, it is CSA scheme from a local village, the share is small so it only does about one or two meals for us, because of that scheme this other larger company will not deliver as they would be in competition which I get.  We have been using a friend's address to bypass that but they were renting and told us at the beginning of the summer that they were having to move.  Luckily for us we have other friends in the same village so we were able to continue with our delivery.  I had hoped that a new organic veg shop was going to open in our nearest town but sadly the plug was pulled on the venture, I would have preferred to have visited a shop each week as I could buy what I wanted but the box is a good alternative to buying in the supermarket where everything is covered in plastic.  I had been finding that the box we had been having was no longer big enough for our needs so we have now increased to three boxes a week!  One is fruit which we get once a fortnight but even with three boxes it is really good value and far cheaper than buying elsewhere.  I have stopped buying any fruit and veg in the supermarket for the first time in years.  I would love to stop shopping in a supermarket completely but there are few items that I have not been able to find elsewhere so we still use it for a few things but the number of items is gradually dwindling, I hope that there will be a time when I can stop completely.  I much prefer to support local small businesses.

I dug out my elderberry syrup and the dregs of garlic syrup recently.  I made the garlic syrup years ago but it has lasted well, the elderberry was made last year and there is still plenty left.  They were so useful to have in the pantry when we all went down with some cold type virus recently.  A cup of elderberry syrup mixed with hot water is wonderful warming drink when you have a cold.  

I have been given a big bag of apples which I need to peel and do something with.  I will most probably cook some up into a chutney and make the rest into a sauce, freezing some and dehydrating the rest to make fruit leather.  I am also on the look out for some pickling onions which I also usually make at this time of year.  My husband loves pickled onions and this is lovely treat for late winter/early spring.  The last of my tomatoes have failed to ripen and probably won't now that the days are shorter and cooler.  I will be picking them soon to make some tomato ketchup with, they are mix of slightly ripened and green ones and they make a delicious ketchup despite not being ripe.  I don't have much room to store alot of food in my pantry once I have some chutney, pickled onions and ketchup the shelves will be full again.  We have run out of chilli jam so I will be making more of that once I have more chillis.

I watched a series of programmes about making sourdough bread.  It was a fascinating watch and I kept rewinding bits to watch techniques again.  I learnt so much and have been putting the various techniques into practice here.  I am now making bread rolls twice a week and they are much improved.  I think I might try making a loaf now, they have always been a bit of a disaster but I am feeling more confident with what I am doing now.  Like so many things it is not so much following a set of specific directions but having a go and getting a feel for it, I guess that is how all cooking skills would have been passed on before the days of recipe books.  There are so many factors that can effect a sourdough loaf that is easy to get disheartened, the beauty of a home made loaf is that it will not be the same each time you make it but that can make learning hard as a different thing may go wrong each time.  Those rather flat, teeth breaking loaves are not happening as often now which means I have less breadcrumbs to hand but we have more delicious bread to eat which is always a winner!

My kitchen is a busy place, I spend so much time in there so it is not surprising I have so much to write about.  Thank you for reading this long post.

Adventures in my Kitchen

This post comes from my kitchen,  I am a meal planner and have been for the best of thirteen years, but I am not here to convert you all to doing that too.  One of the downsides of meal planning is that it is just as easy as any other way of organising your meals to get stuck in that good old rut of always cooking the same thing all the time.  It does not require much thinking and some weeks there is not much space for that, so sticking with what you know is the best and quickest option.  Some weeks, I do have the headspace and I get the recipe books out to get inspired.  

On one such foray I came across some pages that I had completely missed in one of my books.  It was easily missed as I meal plan from my weekly veg box and if I am looking for new recipes I turn to the index for recipes that include the veg that I have to hand.  These pages I had missed would not have been included in the index as whilst they are a recipe they are more like a formula for a recipe rather than a formally written one.  

I am loving these pages particularly the one for warm salads.  You roast some veg, add some protein (cheese, nuts or pulses), some leaves such as spinach or rocket, and finally make a dressing adding some herbs.  This has become a weekly fixture on our menu, it is different every time although we usually have the same dressing olive oil and pomegranate molasses which is our new favourite.

Like so many parts of the world our energy prices have gone up considerably recently, my husband saw a slow cooker for sale in a charity shop and decided it might be a good idea for us to have one, as he was sure that it would save us lots of money cooking our food.  He didn't buy the one in the charity shop but spent several hours researching the best one to buy.  We are now the proud owners of a slow cooker, many years after many of you, I would expect, as I know that they have been around for years.  I keep finding things that it is possible to make in it and whilst I was a little sceptical that it would get used much I am totally sold now.  I can see that on those very rare days when the house gets hots (this is all relative you understand we rarely, if ever, get temperatures over about 25°C/77°F) if I do need to cook something it will be better to use the slow cooker rather then the oven which ends up making the house even hotter.  I am loving that I can prepare our evening meal in the morning and it can spend the day slowly cooking whilst I get on with other things.  On those days of the week when time is scarcer this is a huge bonus, I am finding that I often make use of the slow cooker even on days when I don't need to.  Aside from the obvious stew like meals I have also been using the slow cooker to do Jacket potatoes, roasted veg and have even cooked a chicken in it.

Years ago I created a sourdough starter which I kept going for a long while.  I stopped eating gluten for a whole year about five or six years ago and gave my starter away to a friend.  About six months ago I got one going again and it is finally maturing into a reliable and tasty starter like my last one.  Sourdough always seemed like a scary and strange process to me but it is so far from this.  I have had several conversations with a baker at a local farmers market who has kilos of sourdough starter for his business.  The tips I picked up from him through our conversations as I bought his wonderfully tasty handmade baked goods have been invaluable.  We don't eat much bread in our house so I tend to make rolls once a week, when I have the time, we are also really enjoying sourdough pizza dough once a month too, all made with flour, water and wild yeasts, how amazing is that?

I have already mentioned energy prices here whilst the slow cooker is proving to be my new best friend in the kitchen there are some things that I do turn the oven on for still.  I am maximising my use of it each time I use it and often do some baking at the same time.  As this always coincides with making a meal my kitchen gets messy very quickly as I try to minimise the time the oven is on.  I have sedimentary layers of washing up and opened ingredients from the cupboards.  There is something really satisfying about clearing that all away when everything is in the oven.  

I often have something sitting soaking alongside my sourdough starter, when it is not in the fridge.  This past month I made new batch of wholegrain mustard.  We get through a lot of mustard, I used to buy it in large pots from a food wholesaler I use.  I only order every three months so if something is not in stock it is a long wait before I can try again.  This happened to me a year or so ago, stuck without a supply and not being able to find one that was not full of preservatives in the shops, what is with preservatives in mustard?  That has always baffled me.  I turned to the Internet wondering if I could make it myself, it turned out I can and it is unbelievably easy I cannot believe I have not tried this before.  You soak some mustard seeds in vinegar for a few days or if you are like me you forget about it and the few days becomes a few weeks, after soaking you whizz it up in a blender, retaining a few seeds to make it wholegrain, along with a few spices for flavouring.  I made some and gifted it at Christmas last year.

I have also been drinking Cleaver tea.  Cleavers is that plant that sticks to you, sometimes called goosegrass or sticky grass in these parts.  Cleavers is a good cleansing herb which was often used to make a tea at this time of year to clear out the system after the winter particularly at those times when folks were self sufficient and relied on their own stores.  I am making about a pint at a time and drinking a small glass full each morning before eating.  I don't suppose it is good to drink this all the time, I have been making one quantity a week.

I also have a jar of oil steeping with comfrey leaves from the garden, they will sit there for six weeks before I strain the leaves and make a salve with it by adding melted beeswax.  I first made some comfrey salve years ago when I spent an afternoon with a herbalist.  I continued to make my own after I used up that initial jar, I also make plantain, dandelion and yarrow salves too, they also make a lovely present.  Each salve has its own uses, yarrow, made using the leaves, is used like arnica cream except it has the added benefit that it can be used on open wounds which arnica cannot.  Dandelion, made with the petals,  is good for joint pain, particularly arthritic pain, and sore muscles.  Plantain, made using the leaves, is good for bee and wasp stings, insect bites, skin conditions such as eczema, psoriasis, sunburn, itches and wounds.  Comfrey is used for burns, cuts, sprains and sore muscles, bruises and fractures.  

My least favourite housework task is washing up, the large piles of unwashed pots that are nearly always a feature in the corner of my kitchen will attest to this.  Our dishwasher broke a few weeks ago, it had become increasingly unreliable and randomly left items unwashed each time we ran it until it finally stopped working completely by spewing water over the floor rather than draining it out.  My husband has had it apart and ordered various bits for it in an attempt to fix it, we are now waiting for a part which we hope will solve everything and it can be returned to its rightful place in the kitchen, it is currently sat looking rather forlorn, and in pieces in the garage.  We did find a large ball of rather greasy looking detritus in one of the pipes which probably explained the lack of draining.  The washing machine went out in sympathy with the dishwasher a few days after the floor got an unexpected wash.  That was a quicker fix and for the moment seems to be working fine.  A machine full of bedding had to be washed twice after it was covered in detritus from somewhere deep in the machine.  I think my kitchen appliances are in collusion with each other as at the end of last week a piece broke off one the shelves in the door of my fridge which nearly sent a half drunk bottle of wine and a jar of mayonnaise onto the floor as I swung the door open.  The fridge is ancient and is looking rather sad and tired, the shelves in the fridge itself are rather cracked and distinctly saggy, one has been replaced by a piece of twin wall plastic leftover from when we made a cold frame.  We have fixed the fridge too, for now.

What's been happening in your kitchen this past month?